"Empathetic" is usually said as if it were one thing. Mark Davis's research suggests it is at least four: seeing things from someone's point of view, caring about what happens to them, being moved by stories, and being shaken yourself when things get tense.
This guide explains the four facets and how our empathy test, which uses Davis's Interpersonal Reactivity Index with his permission, reports them.
The Interpersonal Reactivity Index treats empathy as four related but separate tendencies: perspective taking, imagining how things look to someone else; empathic concern, warmth for people in trouble; fantasy, entering the feelings of fictional characters; and personal distress, one's own unease in tense situations. Mark Davis developed its 28 items in 1980.
The four facets
The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980) has 28 statements, seven for each facet, answered from "does not describe me well" to "describes me very well".
- ✦Perspective taking: the tendency to see things from other people's point of view in real life.
- ✦Empathic concern: warmth, compassion, and concern for people in trouble.
- ✦Fantasy: putting yourself into the feelings of characters in books, films, and daydreams.
- ✦Personal distress: your own anxiety and unease in tense emotional situations and emergencies.
How the facets relate
In Davis's 1980 data the facets were related but far from the same. Perspective taking went with more empathic concern and slightly less personal distress. Empathic concern and personal distress were nearly unrelated: feeling for someone and feeling shaken yourself are different reactions. Fantasy went with empathic concern but hardly at all with perspective taking.
Why there is no total empathy score
Davis advises against adding the four facets together. A total hides which facet is doing the work, and personal distress tends to run against the other three, so two people with the same total could have opposite profiles. He also publishes no norms or cut-offs and did not design the instrument to sort people into high or low empathy.
How our test reports it
Our test administers the 28 items verbatim, scored as the author describes: each facet is a sum from 0 to 28. Each score is set beside the means for men and women in Davis's 1980 sample of 1,161 American undergraduates, as a reference point, never as a percentile or a label. The free result shows the facet farthest from that sample; the four are never totalled. The IRI is free for non-commercial use, and we use it with the author's permission.